Obama Right To Oppose Keystone Pipeline

Associated Press

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy exchange congratulations after the signing of a bill authorizing expansion of the Keystone XL pipeline on Feb. 13.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy exchange congratulations after the signing of a bill authorizing expansion of the Keystone XL pipeline on Feb. 13. (Associated Press)

President Obama draws important line on Keystone Pipeline

Despite what you might hear, President Barack Obama is not poised to veto the Keystone XL pipeline. He's poised to veto a bill that would negate his authority to decide and would cut short the State Department review. Congress wants to act now and ask questions later. Obama wants to have the questions answered before making an executive decision. He's also stalling to allow time for the nation to realize he's right, that building the Keystone pipeline would stain the American character.

I love this country, but the federal government is an expensive circus with lousy performers. Consider House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who called people like me "left-fringe extremists and anarchists," for the simple reason that we prudently disagree with him. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, isn't much better. His group refused to go on record linking recent climate change to human activity, a fact that's been known to my students for decades.

And please don't buttonhole me about Keystone's alleged costs and benefits, all of which are debatable. I'm opposed for ethical reasons. I'm drawing my line in the Sand Hills of Nebraska — from my heart, not my head. A line similar to one I drew for the Wilderness Act of 1964, when the American people decided to restrict the human stain from blighting all places, and another for the Endangered Species Act of 1973, when we decided not to kill everything standing in the path of economic expansion. The year 2015 is a good one in which to reverse our lockstep march toward climate disruption, if only to help reduce human violence around the world.

Violence results from human conflict. That conflict derives from strife often focused along ethnic lines. That strife is often linked to natural resources such as places to live, water to drink and soils for growing food. These resources are allocated not by governments but by climate. This isn't a new idea. In fact, there's an enormous literature linking human violence to climate change.

Last September, the new Congress was on the campaign trail as the rate of carbon pollution was hitting an all-time high. A year earlier, three social scientists from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley were publishing a comprehensive global synthesis, "Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict."

Their accounting is stunning across a wide range of violent actions, geographic scales and time spans. This meta-analysis concludes that "the magnitude of climate's influence on modern conflict is both substantial and highly statistically significant" across the globe from Africa to the Americas, Eurasia and Australia, and across disciplines ranging from archaeology to criminology. "Overall," the editors concluded, "warmer temperatures or extremes of rainfall can be causally associated with changes in interpersonal violence and in civil war."

The link between violence and climate disruption "appears to extend across the world, throughout history, and at all scales of social organization." In pre-history, cultural extinction has been compellingly linked to climate disruptions: Mayan civilization in Mexico, the Angkor kingdom in southeast Asia, dynastic transitions in China, the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia, and upheavals in Europe. No political leader from those cultures is here to vote against Keystone. Looking ahead, academic historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have given us "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future" as plausible science fiction.

In the present, consider Afghanistan. Unexpectedly parching conditions are creating water shortages that are increasing civil unrest in a place we've just spent trillions of borrowed dollars to stabilize. Consider Washington, D.C. Could heightened political warfare in Washington be linked to the regional stresses associated with climate change in the United States?

Thankfully, Congress is in recess. For the sake of world peace, now's the time to contact your federal elected officials and urge them to let the State Department make its ruling. You don't have to like our current secretary of state or sitting president. You only have to dislike violence.